"There are many significant reasons why Giva was selected over other vendors, but the biggest differentiator is that the Giva user interface is uncomplicated, uncluttered, clean and extremely easy to use."

Floyd Withrow

Chief Information Officer

Gordon & Rees LLP

Business Results Achieved

When compared with BMC® Track-It!™ by BMC Software, the Giva Service Management Suite resulted in a:

70% increase in support issue management productivity from using the Giva dashboard & real-time reports

60% increase in meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

50% increase in the number of calls being logged

50% increase in the speed to navigate, find knowledge articles, and edit service requests

40% increase in the speed of opening service requests

30% increase in support technician productivity by using Giva eKnowledgeManager

We have had an 80% increase in the number of service requests logged during evenings and weekends.

We are now logging over 50% more calls with Giva than with BMC Track-It!

We have been able to create service requests approximately 40% faster on average in Giva than with BMC Track-It!

Floyd Withrow,
Chief Information Officer, Gordon & Rees LLP

The Challenge

By Floyd Withrow
Chief Information Officer

Gordon & Rees was founded in San Francisco in 1974, and we support 1200 employees in 27 offices throughout the United States. The firm ranks at No. 141 on the AmLaw 200 list of the largest law firms. We have been growing rapidly over the last six years, and prior to using Giva, we were using BMC® Track-It!™ by BMC Software for our call tracking solution.

For some time I had known that we were not capturing all of the information associated with our support calls, especially after hours in the evenings and during weekends, which was due to a number of factors. In order to log a service request during the evenings and weekends, our IT team had to first log into the firm's remote access solution from their home or mobile computer, and then they had to log into our call tracking system, which had an interface we found overly-complex. All of these barriers prevented a lot of calls from being logged, and we were losing all the metrics and trends associated with these service requests.

We were looking for a cloud solution with high security, easy accessibility and reliability so that we could leverage it as part of our business continuance strategy, and so we would not have to pay more money to duplicate this important business application. Reporting was also very important to us as we want to strategize based on metrics and trends to better justify IT headcount and resources. Further, we want to better measure the performance of IT personnel with customer satisfaction surveying and other trending reports.

The Solution

Fluent in 1 hour

Our first objective with Giva was to focus on getting our Level 1 organization reoriented to opening service requests for every incident, even in the evenings and on weekends. With Giva, we have eliminated a time consuming step of logging into our VPN. Since Giva can be securely accessed from anywhere in the world, remote access in to our firm network is not required. Giva also has a very intuitive and easy-to-use interface that allows our agents to quickly log service requests with little effort. As a result, we have had an 80% increase in the number of service requests logged during evenings and weekends. Using Giva's trends reports and metrics, I have made staffing changes and been able to properly rebalance resources allocated to after-hours and weekend technical support.

One of the key reasons we selected Giva was the ease-of-use and very visual nature of all the screens and how Giva presents them very differently than the other vendors that we evaluated. Giva takes advantage of the screen real estate without being overwhelming with too many details, and it is very easy to complete a service request, starting at the top and quickly moving to the bottom, in less than thirty seconds. Giva's design is very balanced, intuitive, and aesthetically pleasing and allows our team be more productive and encourages widespread use and acceptance by our IT users, who have embraced using the Giva cloud application.

One significant business result of this is that on an overall basis, taking into consideration calls during business hour, after hours and weekends, we are now logging over 50% more calls with Giva than with BMC Track-It!. This has been an enormous benefit to the IT group, and now our reports are an order of magnitude more accurate, and in turn much more useful.

The Giva Quick Ticket™ and Tsunami Ticket™ have allow us to exponentially increase the speed that we can open up service requests as compared to when we were using BMC Track-It!, which had some templates that we could have used to set up quick tickets, but required significant setup to use effectively, and as a result were infrequently utilized. We have been able to create service requests approximately 40% faster on average in Giva than with BMC Track-It!

It is also 50% faster to navigate, find knowledge articles, and edit service requests in Giva when compared to BMC Track-It! The extensive library of keyboard shortcuts further helps the speed in creating and editing service requests. When searching for knowledge articles or previously created service requests, Giva has a "Google-like" interface that allows us to retrieve clear and concise information with high relevancy rankings related to the search criteria. In summary, our Level 1 agents have increased their daily service request management productivity over 50% by using Giva as compared to BMC Track-It!

Shortly, we are going to start using the Giva customer satisfaction survey and related trend reports, which we know will enhance the value we provide to attorneys and staff and will enable us to better grade and differentiate the performance of our Level 1 and Level 2 agents. This will help raise the bar on the level of performance of the entire IT department and will be a very valuable tool when integrated with our current personnel performance and evaluation methods.

Deploy in just days
Highly customizable without consultants

It was very easy to get up and running on Giva. We had to take a step back from our old system to make sure going forward we would be properly customizing Giva to take advantage of all of its capability. We did some advance planning with our Giva account manager, and all the configuration and customizations were done, without outside consultants, in a very timely manner that met our internal goals for getting up and running on a new system with little effort. We were able to deploy in only about two weeks, although we could have compressed that to just a couple of days, but wanted to take time to rethink our use of some of the service request fields, such as the nature of request, root cause, etc. Overall, getting up and running on Giva was a very simple and straight forward process.

The Giva knowledgebase has improved our support technician productivity by 30% and it is highly integrated with all other aspects of the application. For example, an agent can be reading notes in a service request and then can click on a link and instantly retrieve a number of highly relevant articles based upon the problem description on their screen. This aspect has really helped further increase our productivity.

Giva's LDAP integration option keeps our Active Directory database synchronized with the Giva database so we do not have to manually perform moves, adds and changes. It was very easy to implement this integration, and now any changes in our Active Directory are automatically and securely pushed to Giva within thirty seconds. These two databases are kept in near real-time synchronization, and we did not have to open up our firewall to Giva.

Since Giva is externally hosted at data centers outside of our firm, we are able to leverage this approach to support our business continuance plan since Giva is one less application that we have to worry about. We found Giva to be a more compelling value since it is much easier to use, can be accessed anywhere, captures more calls, and the reports and dashboards provide extremely useful, business-decision data.

Real-time reports & dashboards without effort

Overall, IT productivity has increased substantially and our effectiveness in managing our support service requests has improved over 70% from using Giva's dashboard, easy service request input and real-time reports. The dashboard is helping us deliver more consistent and fair service quality across the firm in accordance with standardized service level agreements (SLAs). The dashboard has also helped us impose some order and discipline as to which service requests we focus on as the top priorities. Our different IT workgroups are working more cohesively as a team since all of their work can be simultaneously viewed by all team members.

We occasionally do circumvent an SLA and quickly service a VIP customer, whom the Giva interface allows us to easily identify as a VIP in a very visual fashion within the person's profile. This is an outstanding feature and is very helpful for new employees and contractors who do not know the VIPs in our firm. In BMC Track-It!, we could only add a VIP note in a field, which was not obvious, and as a result was often overlooked by technicians unfamiliar with some of our VIPs. With Giva, VIPs are now handled much more consistently, resulting in a much higher level of VIP customer satisfaction.

The Giva reports are much more meaningful to me since we are now more accurately capturing all of our support calls. Since the Giva Tsunami Ticket is so easy to use, I know that we are more accurately measuring major events and the real cost to the organization. With BMC Track-It!, we could not accurately measure major events. Further, Giva has a number of excellent tools, metrics, and reports that allow us to understand the impact and have a full picture of these large scale incidents that affect many users and offices in the firm. This is an enormous benefit of Giva as compared to BMC Track-It!

With Giva, we have increased meeting our Service Level Agreements (SLAs) by over 60%. There are a series of email warnings that go out on a scheduled basis to remind the responsible assignee and service group members of a possible approaching SLA breach. We also have a number of dashboard grids and charts on the home page that keep Level 1 and Level 2 agents appraised of the status of all service requests to better ensure meeting SLAs.

It is very helpful to view which IT team members are logged into Giva from just looking at the home page dashboard. For example, an office Administrator or IT Technician in a remote office can quickly view which technical resources across the firm are logged into Giva and available at headquarters or at other offices. This way, an important service request can be assigned to a person that is logged in and active in Giva. Using this workflow, a resolution can be achieved in a very short amount of time, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

The ability of agents to view each other's service request assignment queue is very helpful as well and has significantly increased team work and productivity. This allows agents to view the workload on the entire team and encourages each agent to help out in an effort to better load-balance the workload across the entire IT team.

Outstanding Technical Support

With Giva, the technical support we receive is outstanding and very responsive. We get our calls handled in a very timely manner, and escalations have never been required. We are very happy with the technical support provided by Giva.

Before selecting Giva, we carefully evaluated ServiceNow® Service Desk, FrontRange® HEAT and ITSM, BMC® FootPrints, and Manage Engine® Service Desk. There are many significant reasons why Giva was selected over these other vendors, but the biggest differentiator is that the Giva user interface is uncomplicated, uncluttered, clean and extremely easy to use.

As CIO, Giva has been an enormous help to my user support managers, training coordinators and myself. Giva allows me to deploy and justify my staffing and resource plans with metrics, trends and reports. I need to know where and how to deploy our Level 1 and 2 resources, as well as carefully evaluate their performance and contribution to the firm, and Giva helps me achieve these very important objectives. It is an outstanding product that my IT team uses every day as an important technical tool in their tool chest.

I recommend Giva to my colleagues in the law firm industry that are looking to meet similar requirements for their service desk solution. Giva is a very easy to use product and has many outstanding features that we depend upon and which have significantly increased our productivity. There are also always new releases that come out on a regular basis, every few months. We have made a commitment to Giva and are very pleased with the company, their development efforts and its products.